Four

YOU’D THINK THIS burst of purposeful activity would make me feel better, but instead I’m paralyzed by fear. If I wasn’t quite buying Gary Prebble’s schmoozy air of reassurance, Shoffler’s serious and industrious manner is infinitely worse. I think of the Ramirez boys, California twins murdered a few years back. I think of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh, of Polly Klaas, Samantha Runnion, of all the less famous missing children whose faces haunt the world from milk cartons and post office walls.

The fear must show on my face because Shoffler reaches out and grips my upper arm with one of his big hands. “Kids hide,” he says, and now he is reassuring. “That’s the thing. They get lost, they get scared, and usually, what they do is they hide. They might even think you’re gonna be mad at them, you know? Because you couldn’t find them? So we’re going to look for them, we’re going to take a long hard look at the fairgrounds. The dogs might help, that’s why I summoned K-9. Okay?”

“Right,” I say. “I understand.”

He frowns. “You look familiar. You a lawyer or something?”

“Reporter. Fox.”

“Right,” Shoffler says in an automatic way, but then he actually remembers. “Right. Okay.” He pulls a small spiral-bound notebook out of his blazer pocket and opens it. “Now,” he says. “Your boys. They’re what? – six years old, Gary tells me.”

“Kevin and Sean Callahan,” I tell him.

“Birth date?”

“January 4, 1997.”

“Describe them.”

“They’re, I don’t know, up to here.” I hold my hand out at their approximate height. “Blue eyes, blond hair—”

“What kinda blond?” the detective wants to know. “Dirty blond like yours or more like platinum?”

“Almost white.”

“Any distinguishing characteristics, scars, anything like that?”

“Well, their front teeth are only halfway in.”

“Good,” the detective says, nodding as he writes this down, as if the state of the boys’ dentition is a really useful bit of information. This strikes me as nuts, given the one truly unusual fact about Kevin and Sean.

“They’re twins, you know,” I say. My nerves have notched up the volume and this comes out much too loud. I’m shouting. I take a breath. “You know that, right? They’re identical twins.”

“Right,” Shoffler says, “but see – they might get separated. So …” He shrugs.

“No,” I insist. “They’d stay together.” I hate the idea of Kevin and Sean not being together.

“They dress alike?”

“No.”

“So tell me what they were wearing. Kevin first.”

“Yellow T-shirt with a whale on it, jeans, white Nikes.”

“And Sean?”

“Cargo pants, blue T-shirt, black shoes with white stripes.”

Shoffler takes it down then turns to Gary Prebble. “Gar – I’m assuming you got a list of fair employees, who’s working where and what hours? I’m going to need that. Now let’s talk about how best to search the grounds.”

The two men walk over toward the large wall map mounted behind the Lost and Found, discussing how to deploy the available manpower. “When you search the residential area,” Shoffler says, “which I would like you to do personally, Gary, ask permission to look inside campers and Winnies. But don’t push it. Just keep track of the hesitant ones because that might mean coming back with a warrant.”

“Do you think?” I blurt out, “I mean—”

Shoffler gives me a look. “I don’t think anything, Mr. Callahan. I really don’t. It’s just – we have procedures, you understand?”

I nod, but I’m losing my mind. Warrants.

Shoffler turns back to Prebble. “Take down everybody’s name, note whether you took a look inside or not. Ask about folks who work for them, who might not be on the fair’s official list of employees. If this turns out to be an abduction, we need to ID potential witnesses.”

Although I’ve thought of this – of course I’ve thought of it – I’m still hanging on to the idea that the boys are lost. The word abduction crashes through my head like a dum-dum bullet.

Once Shoffler dispatches the search crew – the security personnel, Christiansen, and the newly arrived K-9 team, with their jumpy German shepherd Duchess – the detective lowers himself onto the bench outside fair headquarters. He pats the seat next to him. “Now you tell me about it,” he says to me, “your whole time here at the fair. Where you went with your boys, everything you can remember.” He pulls a small tape recorder out of his pocket. “Myself, I’m partial to handwritten notes,” the detective says, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll record what you say, too.”

“Why would I mind?”

Shoffler shrugs, turns on the machine, then speaks into it. “Saturday evening, May thirty-one, two thousand three.” A glance at his watch. “The time is seven-thirty-two P.M. I am detective Ray Shoffler, responding to a two-four-two called in by Mr. Gary Prebble, who runs security at the Renaissance Faire in Cromwell, Maryland. I am speaking to Alexander Callahan, the father of the missing boys, Sean and Kevin Callahan, who are six-year-old identical twins.”

He holds the small silver recorder between us. Its red diode glows.

“By the way, Mr. Callahan, where’s your wife? She at home? She know about this yet?”

Jesus. Liz. “She’s in Maine,” I tell him. “We’re separated.”

The detective hitches his head to the side with a little frown, as if this is not what he wanted to hear. “Uh,” he says.

“The boys are with me for their summer visit.”

“And where do you live? You local?”

“D.C.”

“Address?”

I give it to him.

“So you came to fair headquarters at, let’s see, five thirty-six. How long would you say the boys were miss—”

“What about an Amber Alert?” I ask him. “Isn’t that something you should be doing?”

Someone at the station did a segment about this a few months back. I don’t remember all the details, but the system, named for a murdered child, raises the alarm about missing children, triggering an elaborate network to inform the public – bulletins on TV and radio stations, crawls at the base of the screen on all the major channels. It even flashes information on those big electronic highway signs that usually warn of fog or accidents.

I feel a rush of guilt, remembering an argument at the station. I was opposed to screen clutter, the weather, the breaking-news crawls, which, in my opinion, distracted the viewer. The Amber Alert seemed like more of the same.

“Afraid we can’t put Amber in play,” Shoffler says. “Not yet, anyway. An Amber requires specific, time-sensitive information: a description of the perpetrator, a vehicle make and model, a license plate.” His hands float up into the air and settle back down on his thighs. “Something. Amber – it’s strictly for abductions. At the moment, far as we know, your boys are lost.”

“Right.”

“We’re not sitting on our hands, Mr. Callahan. Soon as Gary called me – before I even got here – and I realized these boys had already been missing almost two hours, I went ahead and issued B.O.L.’s to the surrounding jurisdictions.”

“B.O.L.’s?”

“Be On the Lookout.”

I nod but say nothing.

“Okay,” Shoffler says, smacking his lips together, “so start with where you were when you last saw your boys, and then let’s go from the top through the day, what you did this morning, how you got here, when you got here, and everything you did within the fairgrounds proper. Let’s get this down while it’s fresh in your mind.”

“We were at the joust,” I say. “The boys went up to cheer for the Green Knight …”

Once I’ve recounted this part, we start at the beginning. I attempt to reconstruct the day. The red diode glows, I talk, Shoffler listens.

The fair is for the most part deserted now, the booths shuttered and padlocked. Shoffler and I head toward the jousting arena. The detective stops everyone we meet, noting name and position at the fair in his careful handwriting, telling them they’ll have to check out with Jack at headquarters before they leave the grounds. He asks each of them if they remember seeing a set of twins. No? What about me? No.

We’ve been through about a dozen such encounters when Shoffler stops walking, cocks his head, and looks at me. “Hunh,” he says with a look on his face that I can’t read.

“What?”

Shoffler shakes his head. “I’m just surprised nobody remembers them, that’s all. I mean – identical twins.”

The remark skitters past me like a mouse in the walls.

At the arena, Shoffler follows me as I walk through the hay bales.

“About here,” I tell him, coming to a stop. “We were sitting just about here.”

“And you were here the last time you saw them?”

“More or less.”

“And where were they?”

I gesture toward the ringside, where “the Green Machine” once stood cheering. I describe – for what must be the fourth or fifth time now, exactly what happened. Shoffler pages back through his notebook and checks something. “So the last time you saw them, they were down there, cheering for the Green Knight.”

I close my eyes, concentrate. “No,” I say. “That’s not right.”

“No?”

“Last time I saw them was right before the final joust. They were in a crowd of other kids, petting a dog.”

“A dog? What kind of dog?”

“Skinny dog – what do they call it? Like a greyhound, but smaller.”

“Whippet?” Shoffler asks.

“Right. It had a thing around its neck – you know, a collar. A ruffled white collar.”

“You mean – like out of Shakespeare? A … what do they call that? A ruff?”

“That’s right. A ruff. In fact” – the image jumps into my mind – “the guy was wearing one too.”

“What guy?”

“There was a tall guy with the dog.”

“And they were both in ruffs. In costume.”

“Right.”

“Huh,” Shoffler says. “So you took your eyes off the kids to watch the joust and then the next time you looked, they’re gone.”

“Right,” I say, with a trapdoor feeling in my chest, as if I’m on a plane that’s suddenly dropped twenty thousand feet. “They were gone.”

As we approach the ring, I see that someone’s inside the arena: a skinny guy in a faded red Adidas T-shirt. He’s raking up horse manure.

He answers Shoffler’s questions politely. “Allen Babcock,” he says in a British accent. “A, double L, E, N. I’m the head groom, take care of the horses and all that.” He gestures to the manure. “Take my turn doing the scut work, too. Mind if I ask what’s this about?”

“We’ve got a couple of young boys missing. Twins.”

Babcock’s eyes dart over to me. “Your lads, then?”

I nod. “Six-year-old boys. Blond hair. You see them?”

Babcock shakes his head. “Sorry. No one’s about now, and if you mean earlier – I’m not out front much. A few fans find their way back to the entrance chutes, but not many. No twins. Not today. I’d remember.”

“Entrance chutes? So where exactly are you during these events?” Shoffler asks.

“Have a look?”

We follow Babcock through the arena and out a gate at the opposite side to what amounts to a staging area. Two metal chutes, consisting of lengths of tubular metal fence chained together, lead to two wooden corrals. “In one chute,” Babcock says, “out the other. The horses can be a bit headstrong – they don’t like all that fancy tack they have to wear for competition. So I’m back here, helping with the horseflesh, and getting the knights on and off their mounts – a right trick with all that armor.”

“What happens afterwards? You trailer the horses away until the next day or the next weekend?”

“No, no. We stay right out back here.”

“Where’s that?” Shoffler asks.

We follow Babcock toward a six-foot-high perimeter fence. “This fence enclose the entire fairgrounds?” Shoffler asks.

“Right,” the groom says, unlocking a padlock and pulling open the gate.

As soon as we walk through the gate into the area outside the fence, into the wide-open world, I feel panicked. There’s a whole wide world out here. If Kevin and Sean are not inside the fairgrounds, they could be anywhere.

“Horses and tack in there,” Babock says, nodding toward a white clapboard barn. “Humanfolk in the caravan.” He gestures toward a large Winnebago. “The knights – well, they’re actors really, aren’t they? As well as riders. They live in the compound with the others. It’s just me and Jimmy here where we can look after the animals.”

Beyond the barn, a field enclosed with white four-board fencing leads back toward the dense woodland. The cicadas roar.

A huge black horse stands next to the barn, tied on either side to a framework. A short, dark-complected man holds one of the beast’s massive hooves and pries out dirt with a metal pick. Babcock introduces the man as Jimmy Gutierrez. After a few words with him, Shoffler writes down his name and telephone number in his notebook.

“Mind if we take a look in the barn … and in your Winnebago?” Shoffler asks.

“Bit untidy in the caravan,” Babcock says. “But go ahead.”

We’re through the perimeter fence and on our way back into the jousting arena when I see it, near one of the metal chutes: a small white Nike shoe with a blue swoosh on it.

The sight of it stops me cold. Shoffler and Babcock are through the gate and into the arena before the detective notices I’m no longer with them.

“Mr. Callahan?”

I beckon, unable to speak. I stare at the shoe. It’s just sitting there, in the dirt, perfectly upright, as if someone just stepped out of it – although, I see that the laces are still tied.

“That looks just like one of Kevin’s shoes,” I say.

“What?”

“Right there. That shoe.” I point to it, a small white shoe with a smear of mud on its laces. “My son Kevin has shoes like that.”

The sight of the shoe there in the dirt, its laces still tied, reminds me of all the times – the surprisingly numerous times – when I’ve caught sight of shoes separated from their owners. Tied together and dangling over a wire. Stranded solo on a roadside shoulder. Dumped in a trash bin. There’s something about abandoned shoes – even shoes outside hotel rooms, even tagged shoes in a shoe repair shop – that’s always struck me as sad, even ominous.

And this shoe – is it Kevin’s? – seems to me a terrible sign, proof of haste and violence. I lean forward, as if to pick it up, but Shoffler stops me, extending a stiff arm across my chest.

“Wait a minute,” the detective says, his voice suddenly sharp. “Don’t touch it.”

Ten minutes later, Christiansen arrives and the shoe ends up with its own little fence of traffic cones and yellow police tape. Christiansen will stay to await the arrival of the evidence technician. The word evidence worries me almost as much as the shoe itself. Allen Babcock claims he never noticed “the trainer” (as he calls it). Jimmy Gutierrez never saw it, either.

“How do you know it belongs to Kevin?” Shoffler asks, as we walk back toward the entrance gate. “I thought they’re identical twins?”

“They don’t dress the same,” I tell him.

“Right,” Shoffler says. “I forgot.”

“Now, let’s take it from the top, from when you got here,” Shoffler says. “What time was that, by the way? What’d the clerk look like?”

I pull my wallet out of my back pocket. “I should have the receipt.” Pulling out the wallet makes me remember how I thought I’d lost it earlier in the day. Something about that incident worries me, but I let it go when I find the receipt.

“Two-eighteen,” I tell Shoffler, reading the time stamp.

The detective has his notebook out again. “And the person who sold it to you?” he says, without looking up.

The question bothers me. My kids are missing and it’s like the detective is checking on me. I answer the question. “Thirtysomething, eyebrows plucked almost to oblivion.” The woman’s voice comes back to me: “One lord, two squires, is it? On Her Majesty’s royal Visa.”

Two squires …

Shoffler eyes the wallet. “You happen to have a photograph of your boys in there?”

“Yeah. I do.”

Shoffler taps a finger against one eyebrow. “I might send one of the detectives back to the station with a photo. Put us a step ahead. We can prepare to distribute to the surrounding jurisdictions. And to the media.”

I knew that the police would want a picture of the boys, but somehow the official request depresses me. “This is almost a year old,” I tell Shoffler, sliding the studio snapshot out of its transparent plastic compartment. I look at it for a moment, before handing it over.

In the photo, my sons are wearing matching blue-striped T-shirts, which is unusual for them. Liz must have talked them into it, because they balk at wearing identical clothing and have only a few such outfits, gifts from Liz’s mom. Liz and I always let the boys pick out what they want to wear (within reason), and they almost never choose clothes that would make them seem interchangeable. Except when they want to mess with people and play what they call “the twin game.” They can’t fool their parents – but anybody else is easy game.

Despite the matching clothes, there’s no question who’s who in the photograph. Placed in front of a camera, Sean does not comprehend smile – or any of the expressions photographers use in its place. No matter how many times Liz explains to Sean that the way he contorts his face is not a smile, no matter how many times he’s shown the evidence, it doesn’t matter. Every posed photograph of him taken from the age of three – and counting – features Sean’s idea of a smile. This exaggerated and mirthless grimace, lips stretched away from each other as far as possible in every direction – is something like what an orangutan does, drawing its lips apart to bare its teeth.

The photograph is almost too much. It feels as if my chest is full of broken glass. I hand it to Shoffler with a strange reluctance, as if by turning it over to the detective, I’m somehow relinquishing possession of my sons.

“I thought you said they don’t dress identical,” Shoffler says.

“They don’t,” I tell him. “Most of the time.”

“Huh.”

Half an hour later, after a tour through the fairgrounds – refining my account of the day – Shoffler’s satisfied. He switches off the tape recorder and sticks it in a pocket. He pulls out his cell phone, takes a few steps away, and turns from me. I can still hear what he says. He’s summoning everybody to headquarters.

I’m in a fog, shuttling back and forth between disbelief and panic. One moment, I can’t believe this is happening. Then I know it’s happening – Sean and Kevin are missing, they’re missing – by the cold fist squeezing my heart.

“I think while we’ve still got some light,” Shoffler is saying into his phone, “we’d better expand the search into the woods.”